Gaudy Night Final Part I

I started to blog about Gaudy Night some time ago but lost track of it. The action of the novel is largely set in Oxford, where Harriet Vane goes to her old college to investigate an outbreak of poison pen letters. She collects some information and meets a young student several years her junior, Reggie Pomfret, who starts to pay court to her. She met him while he was helping a female student to get back into college, after hours. She writes to Peter and tells him she is doing a private investigation.. and he seems interested but he says that he's stuck in Europe for the time being. She wonders what he is up to but begins to be increasingly worried about the incidents at the college. She keeps trying to urge the dons to let her hire a professional detective, but they refuse. Then one of the more nervous students tries to commit suicide - and this causes a crisis. The girl has been receiving anonymous letters telling her that she's going to fail her exams and she gets so upset that she tries to end it all. Harriet finally persuades the dons that they have to call in Peter who has just returned from his trip abroad. He comes to see her and reads her documentation of the goings on at college. They get on much better than they had done before and she is surprised to find that he does odd jobs for the Foreign office, and realises that she had never cared enough to take any interest in what he did when he was not detecting. Peter is concerned about her safety and suggests that when she is patrolling the college at night, she wears a protective collar.